by C. Gockel
Of all times and places, Catharin thought, this is the last time and place I want to be dragged through a religious ritual. The news from Blue had unsettled everyone. More personally, last night had unsettled her. Joe had stayed with her all night, holding her in bed, helping her sleep a full seven hours while he seemed to have slept his usual four. She would not have expected that kind of patience from him.
But in the early hours of the morning, something had gone very wrong. He had tensed up. By the time she came fully awake, almost well rested, he was strung tight, muscles corded in his arms. And he wouldn’t say why.
A breeze cooled Catharin’s face and hands as she climbed to the observation deck. Green’s air was moving, its weather changing. The sky was tinged pale orange in the west, with the sun setting in a tangle of red and purple clouds. Aaron greeted Catharin as cordially as though she had not expressed strong reservations about the timing. “Good holiday.” He smiled. Behind him was a large table set with thirteen place settings of plates and cups. The rest of the observation deck was jammed with chairs and small tables enough for a dozenmore people, the number of those in Unity Base who’d elected to attend the ritual. Catharin had a place at the head table. What a privilege.
Most of the attendees arrived within the next five minutes. So did a platter, which Eddy ceremoniously placed on the table. Around the edge of the platter were arranged a neatly diced tomato, a small pile of mint leaves, and a larger, paler leaf that might have been endive, except that all the greenhouse had produced to date was plain lettuce. “I hope there’s more chow than that,” said Sam, taking a place to Catharin’s right with a loud rattle of the chair.
Wimm came carrying a white pitcher and a plate piled with vat crackers. Joe abruptly seated himself to Catharin’s left. He had been taciturn all day, and nowhere to be found for three solid hours in the afternoon. Whatever he had been up to hadn’t helped, Catharin thought in dismay.
Aaron stood up. The cloud-reddened light of sunset fell onto the planes of his face and made him look rosier and less scholarly than usual. “This is the first of three ceremonies scheduled for this evening, then again at Green’s midnight, then at sunrise. So Starfall lies across evening, night, and dawn for the planet—twenty-four hours in Earth time.”
And not long after Green-dawn, the shuttle would return to the Ship with Becca and Joe. Becca could start having sophisticated prenatal care. Joe could start working in the genetic laboratory, with the virtual computer arena he seemed to need. Getting the two of them Upstairs would happen none too soon. Maybe Catharin could begin to sort out her troubled feelings and her sexual needs then.
Aaron was saying, “This is loosely modeled after the Jewish Passover Seder, may my grandfather Rabbi Perlmutter and my grandmother the Rebbitzin forgive me for just how loose it is. A full meal will be forthcoming shortly—a good one. Wimm has outdone himself in the kitchen tonight.” A scattering of applause faltered as the applauders wondered if they’d done something improper, but Aaron made a gracious gesture with his hands.
On the Ship, Joel had taken charge of the first phase of his holiday. It was supposed to be about remembering the history that had brought them here. What they were getting Upside was more like a Baptist revival than a Jewish Passover. Joel had picked a truly bizarre point at which to decide to exercise command—ordering the Ship and the Base to concoct a religious holiday. But he’d also ended the quarantine, a right move. People had odd ways of expiating their mixed feelings about claiming authority.
Ignoring the fact that one place setting was still unoccupied, Aaron went on. “The Jewish Passover has much to do with springtime, but more than that, it is a historical story which, in the Seder meal, is symbolized by food.”
“Ritual hors d’oeuvres?” Domino asked skeptically. Across the table from Catharin, he sat close to Becca, with an arm flung around her shoulders.
“I invite you all to consider the fact that the platter on our table symbolizes our exodus—from Earth to this place.”
“Does your idea of food include native plants?” said Sam. “That green leaf is swampcress. Totally inedible.”
“Spoken in the true spirit of the evening,” Aaron said cheerfully. “Passover is a time for questions and observant attention. The children present at a Seder meal ask ritual questions about the meaning and elements of the holiday. The children take the roles of wise, simple, wicked, and ignorant. The wise one asks intelligent questions. The wicked one asks questions as if they concern others only and not himself—he is considered wicked because he refuses to consider his personal involvement in his people’s history. Tellingly, he phrases his questions in terms of ‘what does it mean to you?’“
Next to Catharin, Joe jerked in his chair, which clanged against hers.
“The simple child knows the appropriate question but doesn’t ask, and the ignorant one does not know the question and is therefore unable to ask. So I invite all of you to ask questions. Just stick to the history of our flight from Earth. Let us not discuss the moon now. That will be debriefed—” he chose the word with an ironic curl at the edge of his mouth “—later tonight, under different leadership.” He inclined his head toward Sam and again, with dignity, toward Eddy.
“The vat crackers symbolize the food on the Ship, right?” said Becca, eagerly. “Because that’s our manna in the desert, what we ate in the trip.”
“So what does that tomato signify?” asked Tezi Young.
“The first fruits of this world,” Aaron answered solemnly.
Maya asked, “And the boiled kernel corn?”
I must be the simple child, Catharin thought. I know Aaron wants us to ask about these things, but I honestly can’t care. Damn Joel’s timing.
Aaron steepled his hands. “On Earth, corn was one of several widely grown food grains. Corn fed billions. When monoculture led to plant plagues and enormous crop failures, millions died for want of corn. I thought we should remember that tonight.”
Catharin had come this far to help build a world where the lessons of the Green Revolution were applied, rather than learned the hard way. She had imagined a human world with enough wisdom to make hunger and sustenance balance out, with margin to spare for the vagaries of nature.
“Okay,” said Sam. “What about those mint leaves?”
Aaron answered, “The Jewish Seder uses bitter herbs to symbolize the bitterness of the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt.”
An unwelcome, spontaneous reflection came to Catharin. Maybe this new world would not be better than Earth. Maybe it would be bitter in its own way. She thought about chromosomal damage from stasis, children who might be doomed before they were ever conceived. She thought about Chase Scanlan and Fredrik Hoffmann. The breeze of sunset coiled into the observation deck. Catharin shivered.
Aaron continued, “Mint and basil are the only greenhouse herbs we’ve got. I opted for the mint.”
“Sweetness of Earth,” said Sam, “and the wild plants that Earth gave us on its own.” An approving murmur swept around the table.
Joe said, “So one child should say what does it all mean to you? I doubt anybody else here wants that role. I’ll take it.” He had hardly spoken three words to Catharin all day. Now he was in a mood to speak in public. “What does that inedible swampcress mean to you?”
Aaron intoned, “Carl, you discovered swampcress. Would you answer that?”
“This world offers us no sustenance,” said Wing. “Even to swallow small amounts of organic matter here turns the stomach—I should know. It is not Earth, and its abundance of green plants is not ours to eat.”
Catharin could usually reject any morbid speculation that entered her mind, discard it as not useful at the moment. Not tonight. From the beginning, the human race had struggled against sickness, death, and disaster in a dangerous and cryptic universe. Peoples had filled in their gaps in knowledge with speculation and ritual, but had, in the long run, learned enough about the physical universe to cross the stars. And disease
was insurmountable as before, and the genes as selfish as ever, and in Blue and Green humanity confronted a new facet of nature as mysterious and threatening as the old world had been. Catharin’s stomach, empty except for acid from frustration and anxiety, dully ached.
Aaron picked up the pitcher. He sniffed the contents. “Is this drinkable?”
“Could be smoother, but it’ll do,” Wimm replied.
Aaron poured amber liquid from the pitcher into the cups around the table. When he had portioned out the beer, Aaron gestured over the platter. “At Seder, we do not eat the symbolic food. Here, we will, because food is not to be taken for granted on this world. Worse than doing it differently from Seder would be to waste a single crumb.” The edges of his lips quirked up. “What my grandmother the rabbi’s wife would have said about this would take the peel off an apple. She was very strict about religious observances. But here goes. Everybody take a cracker, and put a bit of tomato and mint and a kernel or so of corn on it, and eat it. Take a shred of swampcress too, but as Catharin would say, do not ingest that. Just let it remain on your plate for the duration of the meal.”
It was a strange and barely palatable hors d’oeuvre. Catharin suddenly remembered Miranda Blum and her dinners. No rabbi’s wife: a brilliant, highly educated woman, Jewish by culture, agnostic in outlook, and an accomplished hostess whose hors d’oeuvres were legendary in medical school. Catharin felt tears prickle the corners of her eyes.
“Who’s the thirteenth cup for?” Becca asked. “Isn’t there a cup at Passover Seder for somebody who isn’t there?”
“Elijah, the prophet, at a Jewish Seder” said Aaron. “Perhaps there is another prophet to be remembered.”
Catharin surprised herself by saying aloud, “There were people who told us to go to the stars, and showed us how.”
A murmur of agreement went around the table. Becca said, “How about the engineers, the technicians, the miners, and all of the people who made Aeon?” To that, there was a chorus of assent. The memory of Chief Gerald Donovan came to Catharin’s mind.
“Do we toast ‘em or what?” asked Sam.
“Not yet. At Seder, one drop of wine is taken from the cups for each plague that was visited on Egypt before the Israelites escaped, to signify compassion for what the Egyptians suffered. Tonight, we should remember those who suffered and died from everything that we escaped. There are twelve of us at this table. We ought to be able to come up with one plague each.” Standing, he dipped a finger into his cup, and flicked a droplet of beer onto the table. “Pollution.”
Sam stood with a rasp of her chair. “Overpopulation,” she declared.
Tezi Young said, “Extinctions.”
“Acid rain,” offered Raj North.
Catharin reluctantly rose. “Antibiotic-resistant bacteria and savage viruses.” Then there was silence as people remembered the drastic medical plagues of the early twenty-first century. No one seemed game to top that.
“The greenhouse effect had several disastrous aspects,” Aaron prompted.
“The oceans rose.” Maya London gracefully flicked a drop out of her cup onto her napkin.
“The ozone layer thinned,” said Wimm.
“Desertification,” Eddy offered.
Wing stood up, offering, “War.”
“Pestilence,” said Becca. She rapped Domino’s shoulder. “You went to Sunday school.”
“Famine?”
Now only Joe remained seated. The world’s abundant silence flowed over the observation deck. Catharin could hear Joe breathing—short hard breaths, as though he had been exercising. Joe stood abruptly. “Death.”
Aaron said, “Thank you. In the first Exodus, the death angel passed over, taking the lives of the firstborn sons of Egypt, and that was the last of the plagues. In this new Exodus of ours, we have certainly been delivered into a new land. Not the one we expected.” Aaron picked up his expedition-issue white cup, wrapping his long fingers as gracefully around it as though it were a crystal goblet. He began to chant in a different language with an exotic cadence. Hebrew. A human tongue older than old. Even Catharin, not in a receptive mood, felt the hair on the back of her neck rise with awe. On this quiet, voiceless world, with a quiet breeze blowing, Aaron’s words could carry all the way to the alien forest. Then he said, “Everybody take a sip of your beer.”
The beer tasted strong, laced with the flavor of hops. A little sputter came from Maya on the other end of the table.
Wimm and Eddy took the empty platter, plate, and pitcher away, returning with serving dishes. Aaron was right; Wimm had outdone himself with aromatic tomato salad, eggplant parmesan, and sweet-smelling bread pudding. The bit of shiny swampcress isolated on the very edge of Catharin’s plate looked unnatural next to terrestrial food, as inedible as plastic.
Becca asked, “Is it kosher if the milk stuff, the egg stuff, and the meat stuff come out of the same vat—but none of it is real meat or milk, and there’s no blood at all?”
How appropriate that she should ask the child’s questions, Catharin thought. She has the child—and no one here but she and I know that.
“Given a strict old rabbi like my grandfather, the setup you have accurately described would curl the edges of his beard,” Aaron answered. “More progressive rabbis might say kosher is not the question; here, there are a different set of distinctions to be made, to make us mindful of God’s purpose in our history.”
“What makes you think there’s purpose, much less God?” asked Joe abruptly.
“We made it here,” Becca said.
“Speak for yourself,” Joe retorted. “Remember, I’m the wicked child.”
Beside Becca, Domino put down his fork with a bang. “Why in hell did you come?” Becca put a cautionary hand on his arm.
“It’s a long story,” Joe answered in a drawling tone that made Catharin’s nerves knot up in tension. Joe’s voice usually sounded that way when he meant to devastate somebody with remarks to follow. He turned toward Aaron. “Want to hear it?”
Aaron’s shrug flowed into his outspread hands. “The purpose of this evening is history.”
Catharin almost let a bitter chuckle escape from her. Mistake, Aaron. You have just let your ritual be upstaged by Joe’s mood show.
“Remember how Earth was?” Joe began. “Anything you wanted to eat you had, anywhere you wanted to go you could, most of the aging processes had been conquered by medical science.” He gave Catharin a sarcastic little salute. “Then there were the toys. Virtual reality playgrounds in which anything was possible because nothing was real. Of course, some people’s taste runs toward real things to play with, like flying machines.” He smiled at Domino with too many teeth showing for the smile to convey friendliness. Domino bristled.
Aaron was not going to let his show be upstaged without some effort to keep the symbolism intact. “You have just described the fleshpots of Egypt,” he said. “Many of us thought that decadence was rampant, offensive, and incurable, and that’s part of why we left.”
“Fleshpots? Good word for it. Hell, I enjoyed stirring the pots. I told you I was the wicked child. I redesigned DNA theoretically; and my flunkies in the company, and whatever outside scientists we released the rights to, actually made the novelties.”
“Look, why don’t you keep this short and sweet,” Domino interrupted. Becca’s fingers tightened on his arm.
“It’s short and sour.” There were tense muscles bunched at Joe’s jaw.
“Passover recognizes life can be very sour indeed,” said Aaron, still trying to get things back on track.
Domino said in a harsh tone, “You meddled with people. Made some nontherapeutic, nontrivial modifications. And one of them died. Federal felony. So you had to run. Right?”
Becca hissed at Domino to shut up.
Joe’s laugh had a razor edge. “Guess again. I was the theoretician. I wasn’t liable if somebody else made something illegal, and yeah, the company sacrificed a few.”
Catharin felt
her stomach lurch, as if she’d just tripped. “A few what?”
“Scientists who did the mods and got caught. And mods. Not all of them were viable.”
Anger hit Catharin so suddenly, and so hard, that it made her gasp. “You designed illegal modifications of human beings, knowing that what you proposed would be brought to life?”
“DNA doesn’t want to stay the same!” Joe flung back at her. “It wants change even if changed organisms die. Don’t you see that by now?”
She struggled to find words to frame her fury. “You wouldn’t feel that way if you were the one changed!”
“Hold it!” said Aaron. He put one of his hands on Joe’s shoulder and the other on Catharin’s. They had been leaning toward each other, and Aaron pushed them apart. The dozen Unity Base personnel not at the head table were transfixed, as though they were at a dinner theater with an enthralling play. Catharin felt her face flame with embarrassment. Aaron said, “Go on, Joe. Why did you leave?”
“Guilty conscience can’t be it,” Sam commented.
“The CEO of my company was Vladimir Pang-Park. Heard of him?” Joe looked around Aaron at Catharin, with a challenge flashing in his eyes. Even in a cloud of anger and embarrassment, Catharin realized that she had.
“Oooh. I remember reading about him,” said Eddy. “Powerful and rich, influential in politics.”
“Had his pockets full of pet politicians. And scientists,” Joe said curtly. “He offered me the project of a lifetime.” Joe’s phrases came out short and hot, like steam vented from a boiling kettle. “He wasn’t going to take no for an answer, not from me.”
Catharin was dazzled with comprehension. “Not only did you lie in the assessment interview—you picked the wrong enemy, didn’t you?”
Joe’s face twisted. “I saw my future on Earth, and it was working as a slave scientist.”
Faces around the table looked stunned or amazed. “Oh, my gosh!” said Becca, ignoring the wrathful expression on Domino’s face. “You ran away to the stars to be free?”